They had a control group of 10 or 20 rats in an overall population of 200 rats (Discovery claimed the study should have had a control group that was two or three times the size of the experimental rat population.)
The breed of rat is tumor prone (I assume this is a problem because the researchers were pre-supposing the outcome will be tumors.)
The rats were two years old (a very old rat for such a study, and at two years old are likely to randomly develop tumors independently.)
The rats were allowed to eat unlimited quantities of the food (which is known to lead to tumors even with untainted food.)
They found no dose-dependent correlation between the quantity of food consumed and the tumor rate (expected in toxicology studies.)
They performed no independent confirmation analysis to determine if the outcome they saw could have been arrived at by chance.
So yeah, while it's not as bad as the vaccine hoaxers, it was apparently not good research.
The e-textbooks of the subjects I teach are locked by DRM in a proprietary iPad app, and my license (and my students' licenses) to read them will expire in three years. There is no resale of the used books. I consider these bad things.
On the plus side, the e-books purchase price is less than half the dead tree purchase price. And not all technology-specific books have a lifespan of over 6 years - how long will my copy of "Pro WPF in C# 2010" really be of much value to me? For another DRM-is-not-much-of-an-issue point, the "Database Systems" dead-tree textbook I picked up new for last term (freshly revised, it's in its 14th printing) is still peppered with anachronisms and ancient anti-Agile voodoo practices that stopped being good advice in about 2005. If that book were to delete itself from my bookshelf in three years, I probably wouldn't even notice.
However, the DRM is not selective, and it won't just delete the bad books. If I had a DRM version of the GoF book, I'd be pretty darn put-out to lose that.
So I'm going to pick my battles. If it's a book worth having, it's a book worth having in the physical world. If not, I'm not going to sweat the e-book thing too much.
The last time I traveled to India, I brought 4 kilos of textbooks with me. I would love to have had ebook versions and not have to have portaged those pulped trees across three continents, but part of the presentation was unveiling the stack of books to say "this is what we need to work on". Showing someone a menu of book covers that subtotal to 10MB doesn't quite deliver the same effect.
Oh, and printed books do tear, their spines break, and pages come loose fairly often out of a well-read reference book. If it gets water damaged, it risks mold and mildew. If a printed book is lost, it's gone forever. On the other hand, if an e-book reader starts looking shabby, you simply buy another container and the titles will transfer almost automatically into a shiny new machine. And if the battery in the e-book is dying, your iPad, iPhone, PC, tablet, or Android device will offer you an alternate reading platform until it's charged - even preserving the locations of your bookmarks.
All of the above notwithstanding, I definitely prefer my paper books for readability and the pleasure of their presence. Somewhere under a nearby stack of magazines and books is an uncharged Kindle that I haven't touched in months. I'm pretty much forced by my school to teach from an e-book on an iPad, and while the convenience and cost factors are definitely in favor of the electronics, it's still not my preferred way to read or teach.
There is certainly less collateral damage than there is with a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator. I agree that the killing of non-combatants is their biggest recruitment tool. But this is a Western viewpoint, and not a very practical approach in the crazy world of jihad, fundamental religions, and bronze-age existences.
How to disseminate this info to the True Believers is the real problem. The targets are generally spiritual leaders who can tell their followers any old story about anything at all, and it will be accepted as Truth. "Lies and propaganda from the West are proof that they are evil" kinds of crap. These guys are the ultimate Spin Doctors, who can issue the death penalty to anyone not buying 100% of their bullshit.
Evidence, logic, facts, questioning authority, and free-thought are actively suppressed by every fundamentalist religion. And the region is generally controlled by sympathizers, so it's not like you can just pop a video of Mullah bin-Wankin's private habits onto the 6:00 news and discredit him that way.
So while they may have blackmail-quality evidence against these guys, nobody who would actually take him out back and stone him to death for his offense will believe it, if he tells them not to.
I've been told it's their ad platform that's making them their money. About the only thing I regularly use Yahoo! for is their OpenID services, which I really like for three main reasons: they're not Microsoft, they're not Apple, and they're not Google.
The point of my post was not that recidivism rates are 60% or 80% or any specific value - making an estimate just helps to establish the threshold for cost savings. (If recidivism was zero, we wouldn't need this.) The point is that if this program reduces recidivism by any measurable amount then it is a net economic gain instead of some kind of "free government handouts for felons" as the OP was claiming.
And yes, I think we're far better off providing free educations to people before they become criminals. But because we live in the real world, that doesn't always happen. If we simply ignore the damaged parts of society, they won't heal themselves.
We're already paying a ton of money to keep these guys in jail - perhaps $4,000 per month. We know the rate of recidivism of an ordinary felon is about 60-70% in the first year out of prison. If you spent an additional $10,000 on an education for them, and this training serves to keep them out of jail for as little as six extra months before they commit another crime, it was money well invested as an overall cost savings. If they actually use this opportunity to turn their situation around and build a productive life for themselves, we're no longer paying to incarcerate them at all. So now they've taken someone who used to cost us $48,000 per year and turned him into a taxpayer who is contributing perhaps $10,000 per year.
Even if it only lowers the recidivism rate to only 50%, it was still a cheap investment that paid off.
Back in the day when it was common to simply have a row of header pins serving as a male connector, instead of containing them in a keyed-and-tabbed plastic socket, I once accidentally connected a ribbon cable backwards to the motherboard. Because we were just testing some devices in a lab, everything was spread out across a table instead of being shoved back into a small cabinet. When I powered up the machine, it looked fine, so we didn't pay much attention. But after a few seconds we smelled smoke, and when we looked around, we saw the middle of the ribbon cable was black and smoking. By the time we got back to the power switch, one of the conductors near the center of the ribbon had melted its way entirely out of the ribbon and was hanging downwards.
Somewhere in the middle of the cable, one of the wires carrying power to the device was short circuiting to a ground on the far end. Surprisingly, after we replaced the cable and hooked it up properly, neither device appeared harmed by the experience.
Simply being 5V is no guarantee of safety. Pump enough amps through a thin enough piece of copper, and it will overheat. We figured the 4' length of 28 AWG ribbon cable I was using offered 0.26 ohms of resistance. At 5V, that created a 96W circuit, which is about two thirds of the 150W my power supply was rated to deliver on the 5V bus. As far as the power supply was concerned, that was just a heavy load and was not detectable as a short circuit.
Actually, I think accepting bitcoins for campaign donations would make it much better. Bitcoins are pseudonymous at best, they are not cryptographically anonymous. And the global transaction log shows exactly which wallets were involved, every step of the way. Track the wallet, track the campaign cash.
Sarah Meiklejohn is a researcher who was able to trace the bitcoins used for a marijuana purchase on the Silk Road. https://cse.ucsd.edu/node/2299
I'm all for allowing people to make mistakes in covering up their illicit activities.
High yield would have been if it had destroyed the Busheshr reactor, as has been speculated one of the stuxnet payloads would do. The attack was supposed to open the steam valves on the main turbine shaft, while the temperature, pressure, and RPM sensors would continue to play back a recorded loop of pre-attack readings to disguise the failure.
It would have been a spectacular disaster. Running a 75 foot turbine shaft at wide-open full steam was predicted to be able to cause an explosion as large as a 1 ton bomb. And it's not like Iran could run down to the local Turbine Shack and pick up a spare. Spraying radioactive debris around to hamper cleanup and repair would be a bonus. It would likely have halted their nuclear ambitions completely for a decade or more.
And if you think the uproar over stuxnet was high-yield now, imagine the fallout from actually destroying their reactor.
If you tie the 5V from the power supply straight into the USB ports, there is zero chance of preventing a fire. My 850W power supply is designed specifically to pump 30A into the cabinet on the 5V line. The power supply has no way of knowing if it's pushing that current into a hungry CPU or into a shorted out mouse wire.
It doesn't matter if a USB device is badly designed. There are several places that all need to implement safety measures. USB specifications require that a USB host limit the power to prevent these kinds of problems. A fuse in a mouse might be a fine design choice, but it is not going to improve my safety unless the USB current limiter is broken AND the mouse has some other internal defect limited to the board - a fuse in the mouse won't even protect me against a damaged mouse wire.
Any device that reacts badly to too much current is poorly designed or defective.
Yes, and if I own such a defective device, I certainly don't want it starting a fire. The thing about electronics is that most people could own a defective component and not know until it's caused some other problem.
Electronic devices can have latent defects: poor insulation that's barely adequate to protect the device through testing, shipping, and installation, but as you use the device and move a wire repeatedly, the gap in the insulation causes a short. Should the purchaser be satisfied simply by knowing that he can sue the manufacturer for damages caused by fires? Does it mean the purchaser should never take other precautions, such as installing fuses, or buying equipment with current limiters?
Thanks, but I want to take all the measures available to me to ensure safety.
In theory if a node-based graphical programming editor is created right, it should be able to output code in a syntax for any programming language you choose. Diagram what you want, and click the button for C++/Javascript/Python/Etc., and then you get the desired source saved out for use in your compiler or interpreter of choice. So it really wouldn't have to be a language, but more like a meta-language.
Some people seem to be confused by the idea that whatever meta-language a program is written becomes the primary source code. If you write a UML diagram and generate code from it, the UML diagram is the actual source code, not the.c++ and.h files it spits out. It also makes developers uncomfortable when there are blocks of C++ code they must never touch. (Microsoft understands this, and so they carefully try to make their visual editors work both ways, where they parse the C# code to alter the values on the forms. But it still causes friction.)
As long as it accepts what I do as the source for a repeatable process that ends in the desired results, it can be classified as a language. The language of a code generator is still a computer language.
Ivar Jacobsen developed an absolutely brilliant UML programming environment about a decade ago that's pretty close to this idea. It would allow the developer to create the classes, sequence diagrams, activity diagrams, state diagrams, etc., and then click "build". He said that it would auto-generate 90-95% of the java code needed for an app, and that the human developer could quickly fill in the rest. Unfortunately, the licensing was something like 5 or 6 figures per seat, and the developers didn't quite understand where its limits were, so most people were unwilling to try it. That, and very few developers are willing to build an entire app in a UML code generator - they would rather "code", and "everybody knows that boilerplate generated code is inefficient."[1] I would have loved to bring in a tool like that. (Ivar's now backed away from it and is making his money coaching Agile instead. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.)
Even ArgoUML can quickly spit out a ton of boilerplate code from UML, and it's completely open source!
The drawbacks to both of those tools is that they're UML, not English. And they still require the developer to understand and manage dependencies.
Ultimately, I'm not looking for C+++, or C##, (+ 1 LISP), or even UML to rise up and become the One True Language. I think we need to get to the really usable computers from Star Trek, where they interpret and understand the user's intent contextually, they understands their own resources and their dependencies, and they produce the desired results in an appropriate manner. (It's funny how often they were unable to interpret the crew's commands when they needed a plot device for the crew to solve.) And we are finally starting to see such things emerge in real-world (but still limited) domains today. Siri is a good example of a context aware interpreter, even though it still can't create a significant repeatable process. At least it can sometimes set state that other repeating processes may respect.
Anyway, if this stuff were easy, we'd be doing it already.
[1] This is a common point of misunderstanding. Efficiency is all about cost, and the costs are simply not on the side of most handwritten code. The cost of a software developer's time is greater than the cost of most application inefficiencies they might produce. Code generators spit out pre-tested code that doesn't incur the cost of additional testing. The cost of a single bug reaching production is far greater than the cost of almost every inefficiency (real or feared). A really good compiler optimizer will yield efficient code regardless of the source. And servers can be scaled up cheaper than qualified programmers can be hired. Yet for some reason, developers still insist on worrying about the nuanced differences between QuickSort and HeapSort.
People seem to think that the problems with programming come from the languages. They're too weakly-typed, too strongly-typed, they use funny symbols, they don't have enough parenthesis, they use significant white space.
The biggest problems aren't coming from the languages. The problems come from managing the dependencies.
Everything needs to change state to do useful work. But each state has all these dependencies on prior states, and is itself often setting up to perform yet another task. Non-programmers even have a cute phrase for it: "getting your ducks in a row" is an expression meaning that if you get everything taken care of in advance, your task will be successful.
Ever notice that on a poorly done task that it's so much easier to throw away the prior work and start over? That's because you've solved the hard part: you learned through experience what things need to be placed in which order, which was the root of the hard problem in the first place. When you redo it, you naturally organize the dependencies in their proper order, and the task becomes easy.
What a good language has to do is encapsulate and manage these relationships between dependencies. It might be something like a cross between a PERT chart, a sequence diagram, a state chart, and a timeline. Better, the environment should understand the dependencies of every component to the maximum degree possible, and prevent you from assembling them in an unsuccessful order.
Get the language to that level, and we won't even need the awkward syntax of "computer, tea, Earl Grey, hot."
Oh please, it was already dying of a raging case of clamydia. His wife left him yeas ago for some mussel-bound guy, and he caught it from some one-night scallop. He had nothing left to live for anyway.
An engineering division or company led by a non-engineer MBA is guaranteed to fail. Engineering is a complex discipline that takes years to learn. The interactions and dependencies of systems are built on deep understandings of the components involved. We all know of examples where a non-engineer looks at a seemingly simple system with an eye towards cost savings, fails to appreciate the decision making and testing that went into creating it, and offers a naive, previously-proven-unworkable, or untestable change to it. If that person also has the authority to make it a mandate, the failures will come (or will return, if they were previously known.) Meanwhile, the MBA grades themselves by touting to the board all the costs they "saved", and remain ignorant of the costs of the damage they caused or the technical debt they incurred.
The idea that an MBA-only person should ever be in charge of any organization is ludicrous. Even a bank should be run by someone with a degree in finance. An MBA can help an engineer become a leader, but the converse is not true: an administrator with an MBA is no closer to being an engineer than I am to being a giraffe.
HP is being sold off while the formerly-profitable bits struggle simply to coast; not only are they no longer innovating, they are injecting hidden failures deep into their portfolio that will cost them dearly should they ever try to climb from this hole. And they aren't the only organization to suffer this fate.
The Tesla's battery packs contain lots of 18650 LiOn cells,which are commonly found in laptop batteries. They're protected by being individual, small cells, and are above a plate, but if you consider what happens if you smack them with a 20 pound chunk of steel at 70 MPH, they aren't going to survive, no matter what.
No, he's intentionally invoking "Muphry's Law." From his link:
Muphry's law is an adage that states that "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy's law.
Most of those fake people were created as a part of a campaign to establish a higher Google page rank. There's an entire "fictional internet" out there made of self-sustaining, RSS-fed, news aggregator web sites, with links to dozens of other similar sites, and some advertisements for various sleazy commercial enterprises. The pages look very generic, as if someone simply took the default themes in some web design tool. And since the Google spiders can't tell that these aren't real pages, the page ranks go up for the sleaze-of-the-week who signed on with the SEO that hosts them.
They just love to cross links into the "real" internet with "real" people, to leech off the popularity and legitimacy of the humans. Of course, association with those spammers will cost you personally when Google discovers and sanitizes their references to these as they're discovered. Your own page rank may go way down as a result of having allowed them to link from you.
One thing you can do to keep spammers away is to add a rel="nofollow" attribute to any links provided by your users until you've vetted them somehow. Of course, if your photo sharing site doesn't already do that, you're kind of stuck.
Microsoft has a different problem: their older products are their own stiffest competition. Why will anyone buy Office 2016 when Office 2013 already does everything the typical consumer needs?
It used to be easy to sell new versions, because the old versions were buggy, bloated, hard to use, and missing a lot of useful features. But Microsoft has dramatically improved their quality. They've added piles of features. They've improved usability for the average John and Jane Does of the world. They've built a system that does everything the typical user needs. So their old free-ride path of "upgrade our old crap because you need to" is over, because it's no longer needed.
What they've since recognized is that their customers suck at owning computers. Most people don't make backups, they get viruses, they don't know how to manage a home system. So they are offering Office365 in the cloud to appeal to people to not have to care any more (for only $9.95/month). All John Doe has to do is remember his password, and everything else is taken care of for him. They can continue to offer token features and upgrades thrown into the price, but the real money of tomorrow will be made hosting people's data for them, not in the software. It's not the back-to-the-basics approach you advocate, but it's what they're betting will be their future.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it wasn't a sample size of 1 with no control group. But according to one expert, the control group was way too small to derive statistically valid results from. According to UCD researcher Martina Newell–McGloughlin, quoted in the Discovery article (from 2012), here's what they did wrong:
So yeah, while it's not as bad as the vaccine hoaxers, it was apparently not good research.
The e-textbooks of the subjects I teach are locked by DRM in a proprietary iPad app, and my license (and my students' licenses) to read them will expire in three years. There is no resale of the used books. I consider these bad things.
On the plus side, the e-books purchase price is less than half the dead tree purchase price. And not all technology-specific books have a lifespan of over 6 years - how long will my copy of "Pro WPF in C# 2010" really be of much value to me? For another DRM-is-not-much-of-an-issue point, the "Database Systems" dead-tree textbook I picked up new for last term (freshly revised, it's in its 14th printing) is still peppered with anachronisms and ancient anti-Agile voodoo practices that stopped being good advice in about 2005. If that book were to delete itself from my bookshelf in three years, I probably wouldn't even notice.
However, the DRM is not selective, and it won't just delete the bad books. If I had a DRM version of the GoF book, I'd be pretty darn put-out to lose that.
So I'm going to pick my battles. If it's a book worth having, it's a book worth having in the physical world. If not, I'm not going to sweat the e-book thing too much.
The last time I traveled to India, I brought 4 kilos of textbooks with me. I would love to have had ebook versions and not have to have portaged those pulped trees across three continents, but part of the presentation was unveiling the stack of books to say "this is what we need to work on". Showing someone a menu of book covers that subtotal to 10MB doesn't quite deliver the same effect.
Oh, and printed books do tear, their spines break, and pages come loose fairly often out of a well-read reference book. If it gets water damaged, it risks mold and mildew. If a printed book is lost, it's gone forever. On the other hand, if an e-book reader starts looking shabby, you simply buy another container and the titles will transfer almost automatically into a shiny new machine. And if the battery in the e-book is dying, your iPad, iPhone, PC, tablet, or Android device will offer you an alternate reading platform until it's charged - even preserving the locations of your bookmarks.
All of the above notwithstanding, I definitely prefer my paper books for readability and the pleasure of their presence. Somewhere under a nearby stack of magazines and books is an uncharged Kindle that I haven't touched in months. I'm pretty much forced by my school to teach from an e-book on an iPad, and while the convenience and cost factors are definitely in favor of the electronics, it's still not my preferred way to read or teach.
There is certainly less collateral damage than there is with a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator. I agree that the killing of non-combatants is their biggest recruitment tool. But this is a Western viewpoint, and not a very practical approach in the crazy world of jihad, fundamental religions, and bronze-age existences.
How to disseminate this info to the True Believers is the real problem. The targets are generally spiritual leaders who can tell their followers any old story about anything at all, and it will be accepted as Truth. "Lies and propaganda from the West are proof that they are evil" kinds of crap. These guys are the ultimate Spin Doctors, who can issue the death penalty to anyone not buying 100% of their bullshit.
Evidence, logic, facts, questioning authority, and free-thought are actively suppressed by every fundamentalist religion. And the region is generally controlled by sympathizers, so it's not like you can just pop a video of Mullah bin-Wankin's private habits onto the 6:00 news and discredit him that way.
So while they may have blackmail-quality evidence against these guys, nobody who would actually take him out back and stone him to death for his offense will believe it, if he tells them not to.
Maybe they don't have that kind of time.
I've been told it's their ad platform that's making them their money. About the only thing I regularly use Yahoo! for is their OpenID services, which I really like for three main reasons: they're not Microsoft, they're not Apple, and they're not Google.
The point of my post was not that recidivism rates are 60% or 80% or any specific value - making an estimate just helps to establish the threshold for cost savings. (If recidivism was zero, we wouldn't need this.) The point is that if this program reduces recidivism by any measurable amount then it is a net economic gain instead of some kind of "free government handouts for felons" as the OP was claiming.
And yes, I think we're far better off providing free educations to people before they become criminals. But because we live in the real world, that doesn't always happen. If we simply ignore the damaged parts of society, they won't heal themselves.
We're already paying a ton of money to keep these guys in jail - perhaps $4,000 per month. We know the rate of recidivism of an ordinary felon is about 60-70% in the first year out of prison. If you spent an additional $10,000 on an education for them, and this training serves to keep them out of jail for as little as six extra months before they commit another crime, it was money well invested as an overall cost savings. If they actually use this opportunity to turn their situation around and build a productive life for themselves, we're no longer paying to incarcerate them at all. So now they've taken someone who used to cost us $48,000 per year and turned him into a taxpayer who is contributing perhaps $10,000 per year.
Even if it only lowers the recidivism rate to only 50%, it was still a cheap investment that paid off.
Back in the day when it was common to simply have a row of header pins serving as a male connector, instead of containing them in a keyed-and-tabbed plastic socket, I once accidentally connected a ribbon cable backwards to the motherboard. Because we were just testing some devices in a lab, everything was spread out across a table instead of being shoved back into a small cabinet. When I powered up the machine, it looked fine, so we didn't pay much attention. But after a few seconds we smelled smoke, and when we looked around, we saw the middle of the ribbon cable was black and smoking. By the time we got back to the power switch, one of the conductors near the center of the ribbon had melted its way entirely out of the ribbon and was hanging downwards.
Somewhere in the middle of the cable, one of the wires carrying power to the device was short circuiting to a ground on the far end. Surprisingly, after we replaced the cable and hooked it up properly, neither device appeared harmed by the experience.
Simply being 5V is no guarantee of safety. Pump enough amps through a thin enough piece of copper, and it will overheat. We figured the 4' length of 28 AWG ribbon cable I was using offered 0.26 ohms of resistance. At 5V, that created a 96W circuit, which is about two thirds of the 150W my power supply was rated to deliver on the 5V bus. As far as the power supply was concerned, that was just a heavy load and was not detectable as a short circuit.
Actually, I think accepting bitcoins for campaign donations would make it much better. Bitcoins are pseudonymous at best, they are not cryptographically anonymous. And the global transaction log shows exactly which wallets were involved, every step of the way. Track the wallet, track the campaign cash.
Sarah Meiklejohn is a researcher who was able to trace the bitcoins used for a marijuana purchase on the Silk Road. https://cse.ucsd.edu/node/2299
I'm all for allowing people to make mistakes in covering up their illicit activities.
High yield would have been if it had destroyed the Busheshr reactor, as has been speculated one of the stuxnet payloads would do. The attack was supposed to open the steam valves on the main turbine shaft, while the temperature, pressure, and RPM sensors would continue to play back a recorded loop of pre-attack readings to disguise the failure.
It would have been a spectacular disaster. Running a 75 foot turbine shaft at wide-open full steam was predicted to be able to cause an explosion as large as a 1 ton bomb. And it's not like Iran could run down to the local Turbine Shack and pick up a spare. Spraying radioactive debris around to hamper cleanup and repair would be a bonus. It would likely have halted their nuclear ambitions completely for a decade or more.
And if you think the uproar over stuxnet was high-yield now, imagine the fallout from actually destroying their reactor.
It had better. This procedure costs six million dollars.
That's in 1974 dollars. It's about $29 million dollars today!
If you tie the 5V from the power supply straight into the USB ports, there is zero chance of preventing a fire. My 850W power supply is designed specifically to pump 30A into the cabinet on the 5V line. The power supply has no way of knowing if it's pushing that current into a hungry CPU or into a shorted out mouse wire.
It doesn't matter if a USB device is badly designed. There are several places that all need to implement safety measures. USB specifications require that a USB host limit the power to prevent these kinds of problems. A fuse in a mouse might be a fine design choice, but it is not going to improve my safety unless the USB current limiter is broken AND the mouse has some other internal defect limited to the board - a fuse in the mouse won't even protect me against a damaged mouse wire.
Any device that reacts badly to too much current is poorly designed or defective.
Yes, and if I own such a defective device, I certainly don't want it starting a fire. The thing about electronics is that most people could own a defective component and not know until it's caused some other problem.
Electronic devices can have latent defects: poor insulation that's barely adequate to protect the device through testing, shipping, and installation, but as you use the device and move a wire repeatedly, the gap in the insulation causes a short. Should the purchaser be satisfied simply by knowing that he can sue the manufacturer for damages caused by fires? Does it mean the purchaser should never take other precautions, such as installing fuses, or buying equipment with current limiters?
Thanks, but I want to take all the measures available to me to ensure safety.
In theory if a node-based graphical programming editor is created right, it should be able to output code in a syntax for any programming language you choose. Diagram what you want, and click the button for C++/Javascript/Python/Etc., and then you get the desired source saved out for use in your compiler or interpreter of choice. So it really wouldn't have to be a language, but more like a meta-language.
Some people seem to be confused by the idea that whatever meta-language a program is written becomes the primary source code. If you write a UML diagram and generate code from it, the UML diagram is the actual source code, not the .c++ and .h files it spits out. It also makes developers uncomfortable when there are blocks of C++ code they must never touch. (Microsoft understands this, and so they carefully try to make their visual editors work both ways, where they parse the C# code to alter the values on the forms. But it still causes friction.)
As long as it accepts what I do as the source for a repeatable process that ends in the desired results, it can be classified as a language. The language of a code generator is still a computer language.
Ivar Jacobsen developed an absolutely brilliant UML programming environment about a decade ago that's pretty close to this idea. It would allow the developer to create the classes, sequence diagrams, activity diagrams, state diagrams, etc., and then click "build". He said that it would auto-generate 90-95% of the java code needed for an app, and that the human developer could quickly fill in the rest. Unfortunately, the licensing was something like 5 or 6 figures per seat, and the developers didn't quite understand where its limits were, so most people were unwilling to try it. That, and very few developers are willing to build an entire app in a UML code generator - they would rather "code", and "everybody knows that boilerplate generated code is inefficient."[1] I would have loved to bring in a tool like that. (Ivar's now backed away from it and is making his money coaching Agile instead. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.)
Even ArgoUML can quickly spit out a ton of boilerplate code from UML, and it's completely open source!
The drawbacks to both of those tools is that they're UML, not English. And they still require the developer to understand and manage dependencies.
Ultimately, I'm not looking for C+++, or C##, (+ 1 LISP), or even UML to rise up and become the One True Language. I think we need to get to the really usable computers from Star Trek, where they interpret and understand the user's intent contextually, they understands their own resources and their dependencies, and they produce the desired results in an appropriate manner. (It's funny how often they were unable to interpret the crew's commands when they needed a plot device for the crew to solve.) And we are finally starting to see such things emerge in real-world (but still limited) domains today. Siri is a good example of a context aware interpreter, even though it still can't create a significant repeatable process. At least it can sometimes set state that other repeating processes may respect.
Anyway, if this stuff were easy, we'd be doing it already.
[1] This is a common point of misunderstanding. Efficiency is all about cost, and the costs are simply not on the side of most handwritten code. The cost of a software developer's time is greater than the cost of most application inefficiencies they might produce. Code generators spit out pre-tested code that doesn't incur the cost of additional testing. The cost of a single bug reaching production is far greater than the cost of almost every inefficiency (real or feared). A really good compiler optimizer will yield efficient code regardless of the source. And servers can be scaled up cheaper than qualified programmers can be hired. Yet for some reason, developers still insist on worrying about the nuanced differences between QuickSort and HeapSort.
People seem to think that the problems with programming come from the languages. They're too weakly-typed, too strongly-typed, they use funny symbols, they don't have enough parenthesis, they use significant white space.
The biggest problems aren't coming from the languages. The problems come from managing the dependencies.
Everything needs to change state to do useful work. But each state has all these dependencies on prior states, and is itself often setting up to perform yet another task. Non-programmers even have a cute phrase for it: "getting your ducks in a row" is an expression meaning that if you get everything taken care of in advance, your task will be successful.
Ever notice that on a poorly done task that it's so much easier to throw away the prior work and start over? That's because you've solved the hard part: you learned through experience what things need to be placed in which order, which was the root of the hard problem in the first place. When you redo it, you naturally organize the dependencies in their proper order, and the task becomes easy.
What a good language has to do is encapsulate and manage these relationships between dependencies. It might be something like a cross between a PERT chart, a sequence diagram, a state chart, and a timeline. Better, the environment should understand the dependencies of every component to the maximum degree possible, and prevent you from assembling them in an unsuccessful order.
Get the language to that level, and we won't even need the awkward syntax of "computer, tea, Earl Grey, hot."
Oh please, it was already dying of a raging case of clamydia. His wife left him yeas ago for some mussel-bound guy, and he caught it from some one-night scallop. He had nothing left to live for anyway.
It was actually named after the Ming Dynasty
That does make more sense than Ming the Merciless...
No, that was the guy who ordered it killed and opened. Flash Gordon was nowhere to be found, although they did have Queen on the radio in the lab.
An engineering division or company led by a non-engineer MBA is guaranteed to fail. Engineering is a complex discipline that takes years to learn. The interactions and dependencies of systems are built on deep understandings of the components involved. We all know of examples where a non-engineer looks at a seemingly simple system with an eye towards cost savings, fails to appreciate the decision making and testing that went into creating it, and offers a naive, previously-proven-unworkable, or untestable change to it. If that person also has the authority to make it a mandate, the failures will come (or will return, if they were previously known.) Meanwhile, the MBA grades themselves by touting to the board all the costs they "saved", and remain ignorant of the costs of the damage they caused or the technical debt they incurred.
The idea that an MBA-only person should ever be in charge of any organization is ludicrous. Even a bank should be run by someone with a degree in finance. An MBA can help an engineer become a leader, but the converse is not true: an administrator with an MBA is no closer to being an engineer than I am to being a giraffe.
HP is being sold off while the formerly-profitable bits struggle simply to coast; not only are they no longer innovating, they are injecting hidden failures deep into their portfolio that will cost them dearly should they ever try to climb from this hole. And they aren't the only organization to suffer this fate.
I Have Been Whooshed.
The Tesla's battery packs contain lots of 18650 LiOn cells,which are commonly found in laptop batteries. They're protected by being individual, small cells, and are above a plate, but if you consider what happens if you smack them with a 20 pound chunk of steel at 70 MPH, they aren't going to survive, no matter what.
No, he's intentionally invoking "Muphry's Law." From his link:
Muphry's law is an adage that states that "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of Murphy's law.
Most of those fake people were created as a part of a campaign to establish a higher Google page rank. There's an entire "fictional internet" out there made of self-sustaining, RSS-fed, news aggregator web sites, with links to dozens of other similar sites, and some advertisements for various sleazy commercial enterprises. The pages look very generic, as if someone simply took the default themes in some web design tool. And since the Google spiders can't tell that these aren't real pages, the page ranks go up for the sleaze-of-the-week who signed on with the SEO that hosts them.
They just love to cross links into the "real" internet with "real" people, to leech off the popularity and legitimacy of the humans. Of course, association with those spammers will cost you personally when Google discovers and sanitizes their references to these as they're discovered. Your own page rank may go way down as a result of having allowed them to link from you.
One thing you can do to keep spammers away is to add a rel="nofollow" attribute to any links provided by your users until you've vetted them somehow. Of course, if your photo sharing site doesn't already do that, you're kind of stuck.
LOL!
Of course, you're now claiming to be educated by people who generally can't bother to RTFA. That's still not a claim to be proud of.
Microsoft has a different problem: their older products are their own stiffest competition. Why will anyone buy Office 2016 when Office 2013 already does everything the typical consumer needs?
It used to be easy to sell new versions, because the old versions were buggy, bloated, hard to use, and missing a lot of useful features. But Microsoft has dramatically improved their quality. They've added piles of features. They've improved usability for the average John and Jane Does of the world. They've built a system that does everything the typical user needs. So their old free-ride path of "upgrade our old crap because you need to" is over, because it's no longer needed.
What they've since recognized is that their customers suck at owning computers. Most people don't make backups, they get viruses, they don't know how to manage a home system. So they are offering Office365 in the cloud to appeal to people to not have to care any more (for only $9.95/month). All John Doe has to do is remember his password, and everything else is taken care of for him. They can continue to offer token features and upgrades thrown into the price, but the real money of tomorrow will be made hosting people's data for them, not in the software. It's not the back-to-the-basics approach you advocate, but it's what they're betting will be their future.